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I would like to welcome you all in the name of Ustvarjalnik thank you all for coming
My name is Pia
and I would like to begin with a story
Five years ago, when I was in 9th grade of elementary school
Matija came to our school in order to teach us about entrepeneurship.
We imagined entrepeneurship and businesses to be some kind of office work
we didn't really know what he was going to talk about.
but I still decided to attend.
After our school was over I went to the classroom. There was only one other schoolmate there, so I wasnt completely alone.
And then Matija comes to class.
And that's how I happened to be at one of the best classes ever.
And that was five years ago and I'm still here.
And now the circle is complete and I am a part of Ustvarjalnik too.
I am now giving word to Matija and Gorazd
who will now answer your questions.
Thanks a lot
I would also like to greet you in the name of Ustvarjalnik, hi, I am extremely glad we're here today
We came from our first class in my hometown where two people attended
to the point where we have 52 entrepeneurial classes throughout the entire country
and even a step further, where we now have a realistic chance to spread to other countries.
Let me begin with a short introduction of Ustvarjalnik.
Put simply, we are an accelerator of youth entrepeneurship
because we help the young, but I prefer to call it an entrepeneurial sandbox.
When I was thinking about my first business and that was a long time ago
I realized it was difficult to begin. In Velenje where I grew up I didn't really know anybody who had done anything like that before.
I didn't have any peers who would think alike and it was even more difficult because of that.
If you have somebody to lean on, that makes it much easier.
Because I didn't have that group I started to think how I would create one by myself.
And I created one.
After a few years, when the time of my first start up passed and when they invited me to my former elementary school
Yes, of course, we'll do a class.
I offered the group I created in my college years to the younger ones. That's how it all started.
I didn't really emphasize formal teaching, instead, I focused more on providing a practical experience.
Let's give kids free reigns to release all their creative energy, to let their ideas run free and I'll only be here to help them.
Then this sort of leap happened, where people started to say "this is very good, we want more of it. Let's try to do this a bit more systematically."
So that's when me and Gorazd met and started to cooperate intensively, because he comes from a similiar area of expertise.
He is a career counsellor and we realized that we are doing a similar thing.
And that's how it all started.
That's when we started to talk about expanding this thing to other schools, let's offer this elsewhere, let's bring others into this.
The program we created has since then given birth to approximately fifteen student start ups.
Let me explain what a student start up is.
Don't imagine young millionaires or the yuppies in neckties.
Imagine young people who had the chance and the opportunity to bring their ideas so far, that it ultimately earned them at least one euro.
Why earning and why money?
Not because we want to create capitalists.
Because it's necessary to make a full circle.
Because we need to give students that practical experience that is so very absent in schools.
so that students can learn what are the actual way
how to come from an idea to its realisation.
Because when we give that to young people, when we give them the tools, they can decide to do a project anytime.
Maybe their first entrepreneurial success encourages them to later really pursue and live their dreams.
After overcoming several difficulties that came with expanding all across Slovenia and after a very successful year
we decided - perhaps naively but definitely bravely - to apply for Unreasonable Institute.
It's an organisation for which we hold great respect for a very long time. An organisation that does good in the world.
Most of all I have a quote from George Bernard Shaw stuck in mind, saying that only the unreasonable people are those who truly change the world.
Yes, we may have been unreasonable when we applied
which is why we were all the more surprised when we were chosen.
I don't want to be long, so I will let people who created Unreasonable Institute present it themselves.
We prepared a short video insert specially for this occasion
our friends from USA recorded a short statement for us and we are delighted to present it to you now.
Essentialy what this is about is that Unreasonable Institute looks globally for businesses and organisations that can change the world and that can also prove it.
They want them to prove that they make an impact with what they are doing.
We're talking about projects that aim to provide quality tap water in Africa, and apparently projects that teach people how to be entrepreneurial and take care of themselves.
As mentioned before, we applied because we've been following them for a long time, because they're a big inspiration to us
Honestly, we didn't imagine that we were that close.
It was more like a dream, something we could see ourselves doing in a few years.
So we applied and when we passed the first selection that's when the work has just begun
It was a difficult and a rigorous process
We are extremely pleased that choosing among 240 projects from 60 countries this accelerating environment decided to choose us.
What does that mean?
That means five weeks of extreme and intense training
a chance of mentorship, a chance of development in a financial sense
and in a final sense, a chance to develop our organisation in a way
that is self-sustaining and that it really gives back.
that would be shortly what Unreasonable means to us.
Moving on to what that means for people we are doing this for, for Slovenia
it means that as first Slovenes to ever be accepted we got our chance to take what we are doing, our knowledge, to a new level.
It means we aim better, have a better impact and further inspire young people in Slovenia to be entrepreneurial
in a measurable and testable way and in a way that allows youth and others involved to get what they need the most in this story
and that is their first entrepreneurial experience in their early age.
So why are we doing this? Why are we focusing so much on young people?
Because we simply can not comply with the common notion that young people should wait and wait and wait for their first experience.
We believe never before has there been so much invested in a generation, and that they have more than enough knowledge to try it young.
They have more than enough knowledge to face failure, because it's easier to deal with failure as a young person and learn from it
than it is to be in your thirties and deal with your first experience and with a possible failure.
So that is what keeps us going, a belief that young people have extreme talent and that we live in a place
where we can be grateful that young people have the chance to experience entrepreneurship not because they have to
but because we have reached such level of progress that allows us to use it to become successful in it.
not just our stories, not just our students, but also founders of other companies prove that we know how to do it.
That is what keeps us moving forward.
What we need to ask ourselves now is what is the goal.
What is the purpose, why are we doing what we are doing.
The answer is essentially fairly simple.
I believe that every single one of us, every single young and not so young person has a dream.
Everyone has a vision, wishes, if not anything else, everybody has a hobby that he or she would love to do for the rest of their lives.
What we aim to do is simply to give our students the tools and the know-how of reaching the goal and maybe even give them the courage to dream of it.
I always give this example in my classes
I know a guy who wanted to be a professional surfer.
Of course it's hard for a Slovenian to do it, and not just anybody can get a professional contract.
he didn't become a professional, but while he was dealing with his failure, he opened a surfing school.
So, what was his goal and what is his success?
By becoming a professional surfer, what he wanted to do was doing what he loved, for the rest of his life, in a way that allows him to make money from it.
I think a surfing school is a similar success. What matters is finding the right path and the right goal to reach your desired result.
For me, that is the core of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thought.
We aim to make it available to every single young person that walks through our door, and I'll dare to say every single school in the world.
Let's say I have an idea about an automatic fan, so I don't have to wave it around to cool myself down
but I have no knowledge of engineering whatsoever, how can you help an idea like that?
Let me begin by saying I love this, because this is exactly what happens at our classes. People come to us with an idea and what we do is
First we ask them why did they choose this idea. What makes it special?
What for? Who is the person that would use it?
And this can be the beginning of the first test.
We help young people decide whether it's worth continuing
and when they confirm it, they usually see that their idea has sense, and they can see the economic potential behind it, if it's a good idea.
By that time they will have a strong argument why investors, co-founders, technical staff should join them.
Let me just add that because we are a branched organisation and because we cover so many schools with different areas of expertise
for example we have engineering, carpenting, programming schools, that allows us to mix all that knowledge together beautifully.
A lot of our student teams that you will have the chance to meet later have formed the same way, for instance
Pia, a grammar school student, joined her forces with programmers. A start up was born.
She then helped with design and this is the heterogenousity that we wish to establish between the young.
This may be a good point for us to end with the theory and show you how it's done in practice.
With us today is probably the best known entrepreneur of his generation
Jaka Blažon from Vič grammar school who is here to present his project Wivu Please join us and do a pitch - a short presentation of a business idea.
Hi, my name is Jaka, I'm seventeen years old. I am a part of Ustvarjalnik - that means working with Matija and Gorazd - since summer.
What happened was that one time in school me and some schoolmates were playing a game and you know what boys are like, we think we're creative and supersmart and things like that.
and we made a bet that whoever was the first to take a picture of himself with a Renault model 5 wins 20 euros.
We accepted the challenge, we went outside and this girl, a really good student, who didn't really like us overheard us.
She only heard of the 5, which is equivalent of an A grade in Slovenia. A teacher was just returning some tests we wrote
she got the test, she got a 5, she took a photo and sent us an mms saying "hey boys, here's a 5, I want my money by tomorrow".
We were looking at photos of a car and a photo of a grade and we realised that if you give people a challenge, they will come up with their own solutions to the problem.
Our app which is expected to launch next month will give our users a daily challenge.
For example, photograph a child's happiness, take a photo of something that makes you smile, make a portrait of someone you love,... and there's a social aspect to all this.
Imagine for instance a challenge that tells you to take a photo of something that is wrong with your city
or something that needs to be fixed, and you'll have thousands of photos of bad roads or children having no place to play safely.
Surely this kind of app has an impact on social life, but there is also a good monetization chance in advertising.
We know how brands want to build their image on new channels and social media, and if the challenge tells you to take a photo of yourself with a Cockta or Fructal
it allows them to build a much better brand image with people they would otherwise struggle to reach.
Some conversations with brands are already in progress, we're also talking to Slovenian skiing association to promote our ski slopes that way
and I hope and expect that we will reach a big amount of users by summer and that the first advertisers will join in.
Matija, Gorazd and Ustvarjalnik's part in this project is giving me the tools I need. I'm a grammar school student, I'm interested in finances, economics and marketing.
I don't have the technical abilities to develop an app and Matija helped me connect with programmers from a school in my hometown
I am now good friends with them and enjoy working with them. I am 17 years old and the fact that I am known as the most famous entrepreneur of my generation
even though I find it hard to call myself an entrepreneur - I just do what I love
and the fact that Google listened to me at my age, and being told by them that my idea is good, having business cards from San Francisco, talking to them,
applying to an accelerator in amsterdam, having those people click on my posts on social networks, I can't say that would not happen,
but I sure couldn't make it as fast as I did with Ustvarjalnik.
That's it from me.
Everything that Ustvarjalnik is today could not have happened without an extraordinary team
that volountarily do what they do because they believe in good, because they believe that they can and that what we do matters and benefits to the society.
First of all, thanks to Gorazd for being the one who built the vision with me, so that we can stand today before you as founders of a movement.
Thanks to all the members of the team who helped and are here today
Ivana, Matija and Maja, who has just recently joined us.
Thanks to all the members of our classes, who now, entering their college years, still help us by leading the same classes they've attended
which is what gives me courage and hope for this organisation to live on.
The young are so optimistic and so sure in what we gave them, that they become mentors themselves.
That is when things come full circle and that is when we know, that we are doing a right thing that benefits to the society and that we are moving in the right direction.
Sincerely, thank you!
I just want to add one more thing, a comment in light of what is going on today
with the current situation on the job market, what are young people's chances for a job, for entrepreneurship, for success in business or in life.
We are living in a time where the government tries to take some measures to help them with it.
Somehow, it is hard to let this go unnoticed.
What we are doing, what you just saw makes us believe that it is a good indication of employability amongst the young and the older.
because the knowledge and the experience always come in handy.
No matter whether as entrepreneurs, as employers or future employees they have got the contact with the world
they have gotten contact with the entrepreneurial world in a way that it is really made. Not by control, not by some short practice where you do things that barely make sense
for entrepreneur for which you work, to do what you were trained for.
And that is to fulfill our dreams.
This doesn't impact just entrepreneurship, this doesn't impact just hiring.
I can say that with hiring, we use the same methods
when somebody decides - if we go back to the previous question of electric fan
I have a bunch of students who say "I want to be a professional footballer".
Well maybe you won't sign for Barcelona and even he realizes that this may not be the best way
but the moment when youth starts to think that there are open paths to professional sports
even as coaches, as agents, as developers of services and that they can still reach their dreams
that is the way that they can moderate their dreams, that they can moderate their carreers, and usually they do it at the same time
by developing their idea and their company, they develop their character and themselves. That is the first moment.
That means it is not us who give them the ideas, it's not us who tell them what to do.
We ask them. Why do we ask them? First, because we believe that their ideas are good and second, because we believe that they can judge the world around them.
and third, because the main value added of what we are doing, of us being chosen by Unreasonable Institute
is that the young can apply that to any area of life that they wish to.
Not only in career, not only in employment, but when they truly feel that they can change the world and achieve great things.
And they will know how to do it. In the long run, they may even be less dependant on the existing systems
than we are used to today, because they are capable of developing things
and create a network that will help them by themselves.
They won't always wait for help, they won't always ask for help, but before asking for help, they will do all they can do by themselves.
They will know how to turn to themselves and those close to them. I believe that this is the greatest value added that Ustvarjalnik provides.
Now that we can reach critical mass of people to connect, doing this is easier than ever before.
We are extremely extremely greatful that an organisation like Unreasonable can accept us.
due to the fact that while we were making contact with them we saw how very organized they are.
how small details and little things matter to them
because they actually matter.
We may even have bigger expectations now
than before, and we will give our best to make the most out of the chance that they've given us in their five week program.
And that is it, dreams of future, from us and everybody that has ever been a part of our organisation
I wish to thank you all again for coming today
we will be available for 1 on 1 questions, I can see some of our younger
people joined, so we have an opportunity to have some snacks,
have some drinks, and perhaps say a word or two more.
maybe in a more unformal fashion. Thank you all again!